Recommended Listening

The big picture on big data - Endless media releases extol the virtues of big data. Business and government are meant to embrace it. But exactly what is big data? Is it as useful as we’re told and will it really govern our future?

Paul Cooper: We should be talking about big knowledge rather than big data, and the way you get from data to knowledge is by asking the smart questions. So our thinking these days is it's really about formulating the right kind of questions that we can put up as hypotheses, if you like, things that we can ask of this information. And we think that's going to be requiring a whole lot of new skills to come through into the workforce, skills that are really around creativity, perhaps more so than traditional analytical thinking.